Distinguishing Task-Specific and General-Purpose AI in Regulation

Over the past decade, policymakers have developed a set of regulatory tools to ensure AI development aligns with key societal goals. Many of these tools were initially developed in response to concerns with task-specific AI and therefore encode certain assumptions about the nature of AI systems and the utility of certain regulatory approaches. With the advent of general-purpose AI (GPAI), however, some of these assumptions no longer hold, even as policymakers attempt to maintain a single regulatory target that covers both types of AI. In this paper, we identify four distinct aspects of GPAI that call for meaningfully different policy responses. These are the generality and adaptability of GPAI that make it a poor regulatory target, the difficulty of designing effective evaluations, new legal concerns that change the ecosystem of stakeholders and sources of expertise, and the distributed structure of the GPAI value chain. In light of these distinctions, policymakers will need to evaluate where the past decade of policy work remains relevant and where new policies, designed to address the unique risks posed by GPAI, are necessary. We outline three recommendations for policymakers to more effectively identify regulatory targets and leverage constraints across the broader ecosystem to govern GPAI.